Thanks for the information -- I appreciate all the work.
My main concern is with how useful the various utilities would be in an
environment where there isn't a good way for the user to tie them
together (as in the Unix shell). GUIs are okay for tasks where there
aren't many options about the data flow and where any iteration is done
only in simple ways that the GUI programmer has foreseen, but are
awkward to the point of being unusable when those conditions don't apply.
So in the Windows environment a better shell is certainly needed.